Missouri Students Association Vice President Helena Kooi has been working on the MSA budget for two months. She is balancing a budget of about $1.7 million.

“There’s really nothing that can prepare you for this,” she said.

Kooi is in charge of compiling the budget for the 2012-13 academic year, which is expected to be completed in the next few weeks.

The MSA budget allocates funds to many different campus departments, including the Department of Student Activities, the Department of Student Services, the Department of Student Communications, MSA Executive, MSA Senate and the nine MSA auxiliaries.

The MSA auxiliaries include the MSA Box Office, the Craft Studio, KCOU/88.1 FM, MSA/GPC Tech, MUTV/Channel 23, the RSVP Center, the Student Design Center, Student Legal Services and STRIPES.

Kooi has been working on the budget with Cathy Hurst, business and fiscal operations manager for the Department of Student Life, and MSA adviser Farouk Aregbe.

“None of the budget can be done on your own,” Kooi said.

In addition to her personal mentors, she also works with the MSA Senate Budget Committee.

“Every week, we work very closely with her,” Budget Committee chairman Clark Maynard said.

Kooi said the committee serves as a group of students through which she can run things.

“I tell them what I’m working on, and we come up with ideas (for) how to update the budget,” she said.

Maynard said Kooi has only presented parts of the budget to the committee so far.

“We’ll have our first draft presented to us next week,” Maynard said.

As part of the process, Kooi met with each of the departments and auxiliaries to discuss their specific budget requests.

“I encourage everyone to request the budgets that they would want in a perfect world, and then I work with them and kind of whittle it down from there,” she said. “I never make a cut without talking with them first. It’s really a collaborative process. The people in charge of these departments know more about how their budget works than I do, so I try to learn as much as I can from them.”

Kooi said the most difficult part of the process has been not balancing numbers, but working with different department heads to cut budgets for specific programs.

“What I didn’t know (before) is how emotional it would be,” she said. “These people are doing such awesome programs, but it is still my job to tell them what the reality of the budget situation really is.”

Kooi had worked on budgets for some of the organizations in which she is involved, including Summer Welcome.

She said the numbers part is relatively simple because of the template Hurst wrote for her.

“It’s pretty easy to catch when there’s a mistake,” she said.

One of the things Kooi tried to do this year was make it clear through worded descriptions what each part of the budget represented.

“I made it one of my goals this year to add as much detail (to the budget) as possible,” she said.

Kooi sent the first draft of the budget to Hurst on Feb. 21, and Kooi is currently working on the third draft.

MSA Senate will see the completed budget March 20. Senate Speaker Jake Sloan is optimistic about this year’s budget proceedings.

“The vice president and the Budget Committee are working together,” Sloan said.

He said the vice president does not always work with the Budget Committee as closely as Kooi has been.

Sloan also submitted a budget request for Senate, requesting money for a Senate retreat as well as more money for food for Senate committees.

“The proposal that I submitted to Helena is a $500 reduction from last year’s budget,” Sloan said.